“He certainly was annoyed when he saw us watching him!” Eve said thoughtfully.

“Annoyed is putting it mildly,” I said. “I thought he was going to strangle!”

Eve nodded. “Do you know,” she said, “I felt there was something very odd about him from the first. Take his hair, for one thing——”

“Somebody has taken it, or most of it!” I giggled. “He certainly isn’t much of an advertisement for his old lotions!”

“Not today. But he was yesterday when we saw him on the bus, don’t you remember?”

“Why, that’s so! I do remember he had thick brown hair that stuck out all around under his hat. I noticed it particularly, it didn’t seem to go with his face somehow. You don’t think it could have been——”

“A wig, of course!” Eve cried. “That settles it! That man is up to some funny business, you can depend upon it. Of course he wasn’t expecting to see anybody out there in the garden today. I dare say he’d found the wig hot and had taken it off and laid it in the grass or hung it on a branch or something!”

“Still, whatever he’s up to,” I said thoughtfully, “I suppose we’ll have to return his property to him. We can mail it to him in care of Trap’s Inn, I suppose.”

“All right. You’ll find an envelope in that top drawer.”

When I turned with the envelope, Eve was jotting down something in her diary. “No harm keeping a copy of those figures,” she remarked. “Just as a matter of curiosity, you know.”

We mailed the letter to Mr. Bangs next morning. We hoped that we would receive some acknowledgment of its receipt, something which might shed some further light on the mystery. But the days went by and nothing came.

Of course, a man who wears a wig may or may not be a villain. As Eve pointed out, he may have worn it for professional purposes solely. If he was a vendor of hair lotions, then the wig was a kind of advertisement. But even so, I argued, it was deceitful and misleading and I felt that our first impression of the man was abundantly justified.

We spoke frequently of making another trip to the old house to try to find out for ourselves what he was up to. But fear of incurring Aunt Cal’s disapproval held us back. It would be extremely difficult to explain to my severe-minded relative what had taken us there. To discuss anything so fantastic as 

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